VA, Stanford to Pursue Nation’s First Hadron Center

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Stanford Medicine recently announced they are collaborating to establish the nation’s first Hadron Center in Palo Alto, California, for the benefit of veteran and non-veteran cancer patients who could benefit from Hadron therapy.

VA maintains a strong academic and research affiliation with Stanford Medicine. This long-standing partnership has enabled the VA Palo Alto Health Care System to offer an exceptional breadth of medical services to veterans. Now, VA and Stanford University are looking to expand and enhance this affiliation through new collaborative efforts around the Hadron Center and particle beam therapy for veteran and non-veteran patients with cancer.

During his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Obama called on Vice President Biden to lead a new, national Cancer Moonshot, focused on making a decade’s worth of progress in preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer in five years – ultimately striving to end cancer as we know it. After meeting with experts across the country and the world, Vice President Biden identified areas of focus for the Cancer Moonshot – based on barriers to progress and opportunities for improving patient outcomes – and announced a first wave of accomplishments at the Cancer Moonshot Summit on June 29 at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Vice President Biden has releasing the final report of the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, along with his own executive findings, after traveling to many of the major nerve centers in the cancer community. He will also unveil a new set of Federal actions, private sector actions and collaborative partnerships to further advance the goals of the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, including the Hadron Center.

In addition to the Hadron Center, other efforts are underway to support the Cancer Moonshot Task Force: the Prostate Cancer Foundation made a contribution of $50 million to VA for precision oncology research over the next five years; the IBM Watson Million Veteran Initiative will provide 10,000 diagnostic and cancer treatment analyses over the next two years and VA and PCF will host  a national oncology summit, “Launch Pad: Pathways to InnoVAtion,” on Nov. 29.

The Hadron Center is anticipated to be a clinical facility, designed to deliver particle radiation beam therapy for the treatment of cancer patients. Presently, the most common radiation beams used for cancer treatment are photons and electrons, which are easy to target to a tumor but can result in damage to normal tissue. Particle beam radiotherapy, on the other hand, uses beams of charged particles such as proton, helium, carbon or other ions to allow more precise targeting anywhere inside the patient’s body, resulting in less damage to normal tissue. Particle beam therapy can be more effective at killing radiation-resistant tumors that are difficult to treat using conventional radiation therapy. Judicious and innovative application of particle therapy can result in improved cure rates for cancer.

This project would be the first of its kind in the nation and serves as an excellent example of public-private collaboration to further research and clinical care, using cutting-edge cancer therapy.